Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

NYT and torture

Remember that Harvard study Glenn Greenwald discussed about major American newspapers and the percentage of the time they called waterboarding “torture?” And how it almost zeroed out under Bush? Well, the NYT has actually addressed the study and admitted they made a conscious shift (H/t: Andrew Sullivan) away from calling waterboarding “torture” under Bush. That’s bad enough on its own, but even worse is why they did it: to avoid “taking sides in a political dispute.”

The Times’ explanation is that once Bush officials started arguing that waterboarding wasn’t torture, the only way to avoid taking sides was to stop using the word. But here’s the problem: Not using the word also consitutes taking a side: That of the Bush administration.

If that’s the best excuse the NYT has, it’s not even close to good enough, seeing as how it can be demolished in one sentence. The more important thing for me is that even if the NYT did want to avoid taking sides on a political issue, this isn’t a political issue. It’s a black-and-white issue. Torture is evil, waterboarding is torture, therefore waterboarding is evil.